Good suggestion: done that 👍🏼

FULL ATRTICLE ( by popular demand):

BRUSSELS — Nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war in Ukraine, according to the first independent statistical analysis of Russia’s war dead.

Two independent Russian media outlets, Mediazona and Meduza, working with a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University, used Russian government data to shed light on one of Moscow’s closest-held secrets — the true human cost of its invasion of Ukraine. To do so, they relied on a statistical concept popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic called excess mortality. Drawing on inheritance records and official mortality data, they estimated how many more men under age 50 died between February 2022 and May 2023 than normal.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv gives timely data on military losses, and each is at pains to amplify the other side’s casualties. Russia has publicly acknowledged the deaths of just over 6,000 soldiers. Reports about military losses have been repressed in Russian media, activists and independent journalists say. Documenting the dead has become an act of defiance; those who do so face harassment and potential criminal charges.

Despite such challenges, Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, working with a network of volunteers, have used social media postings and photographs of cemeteries across Russia to build a database of confirmed war deaths. As of July 7, they had identified 27,423 dead Russian soldiers.

“These are only soldiers who we know by name, and their deaths in each case are verified by multiple sources,” said Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at Mediazona who helped oversee the investigation. “The estimate we did with Meduza allows us to see the ‘hidden’ deaths, deaths the Russian government is so obsessively and unsuccessfully trying to hide.”

To come up with a more comprehensive tally, journalists from Mediazona and Meduza obtained records of inheritance cases filed with the Russian authorities. Their data from the National Probate Registry contained information about more than 11 million people who died between 2014 and May 2023.

According to their analysis, 25,000 more inheritance cases were opened in 2022 for males aged 15 to 49 than expected. By May 27, 2023, the number of excess cases had shot up to 47,000.

That surge is roughly in line with a May assessment by the White House that more than 20,000 Russians had been killed in Ukraine since December, though lower than U.S. and U.K. intelligence assessments of overall Russian deaths.

In February, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said approximately 40,000 to 60,000 Russians had likely been killed in the war. A leaked assessment from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency put the number of Russians killed in action in the first year of the war at 35,000 to 43,000.

“Their figures might be accurate, or they might not be,” Treshchanin, the Mediazona editor, said in an email. “Even if they have sources in the Russian Ministry of Defense, its own data could be incomplete. It’s extremely difficult to pull together all of the casualties from the army, Rosgvardia, Akhmat battalion, various private military companies, of which Wagner is the largest, but not the only one. Casualties among inmates, first recruited by Wagner and now by the MoD, are also a very hazy subject, with a lot of potential for manipulation. Statistics could actually give better results.”

Many Russian fatalities - as well as amputations - could have been prevented with better front-line first aid, the U.K. Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence assessment published Monday. Russia has suffered an average of around 400 casualties a day for 17 months, creating a “crisis” in combat medical care that is likely undermining medical services for civilians in border regions near Ukraine, the ministry said.

Independently, Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist from Germany’s Tübingen University who has published work on excess COVID-19 deaths in Russia, obtained mortality data broken down by age and sex for 2022 from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.

He found that 24,000 more men under age 50 died in 2022 than expected, a figure that aligns with the analysis of inheritance data.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it harder to figure out how many men would have died in Russia since February 2022 if there hadn’t been a war. Both analyses corrected for the lingering effects of COVID on mortality by indexing male death rates against female deaths.

Sergei Scherbov, a scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, cautioned that “differences in the number of deaths between males and females can vary significantly due to randomness alone.”

“I am not saying that there couldn’t be an excess number of male deaths, but rather that statistically speaking, this difference in deaths could be a mere outcome of chance,” he said.

Russians who are missing but not officially recognized as dead, as well as citizens of Ukraine fighting in units of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics, are not included in these counts.

Kobak acknowledged that some uncertainties remain, especially for deaths of older men. Moreover, it’s hard to know how many missing Russian soldiers are actually dead. But he said neither factor is likely to have a huge impact.

“That uncertainty is in the thousands,” he said. “The results are plausible overall.”

Asked by the Associated Press on Monday about the Meduza and Mediazona study, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during a conference call with reporters he wasn’t aware of it as the Kremlin had “stopped monitoring” Meduza. Peskov also refused to comment on the number of deaths mentioned in the study, saying only that “the Defense Ministry gives the numbers, and they’re the only ones who have that prerogative.”

Meduza is an independent Russian media outlet that has been operating in exile for eight years, with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. In April 2021, Russian authorities designated Meduza a “foreign agent,” making it harder to generate advertising income, and in January 2023, the Kremlin banned Meduza as an illegal “undesirable organization.”

Moscow has also labeled independent outlet Mediazona as a “foreign agent” and blocked its website after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

—

Dasha Litvinova contributed to this report from Tallinn, Estonia.

Maybe some info on scales will be helpful. The Amazon and Brazil are huge. check the pic about USA and South America and the deforestation 1960-2006. The last years it’s become worse.

It’s being done in Europe since decades actually and probably in other places. Not sure though whether the figures are true, and or how they are calculated. But I’d say slowly Europe is getting there.

article Washington Post 2014

Forest and nature destruction, started actually thousands of years ago What has changed though the last couple hundreds years is an extreem population boom.

The first polluted river in the world is like 5000 yo or something.

Ad. just saw someone else saying reforestation even started 100s of years ago. Though reforestation to me, also means more net green.

“Russia has been bringing propaganda to its war effort in Ukraine well beyond its borders. With over 500 million speakers, Spanish is a key language for Russian propaganda, and now Russia’s narrative is getting exposure in sympathetic Spanish voices.”

You do realise it was Russia who’s been shelling the ZNPP, and it was the Ukrainian staff keeping the plant safe?

So, No. Russia hasn’t asked for monitoring. It was the IAEE itself.

" The ZNPP has been controlled by Russian forces since early March. Over the past seven months, its Ukrainian operating staff have worked to prevent a nuclear accident during the current military conflict, in extremely difficult conditions with frequent shelling at the plant or near it."

Also the IAEE STILL hasn’t been granted full access by plant which has been under Russian military control.

" The IAEA experts have requested additional access that is necessary to confirm the absence of mines or explosives. In particular, access to the rooftops of reactor units 3 and 4 is essential, as well as access to parts of the turbine halls and some parts of the cooling system at the plant."

“They ARE doing something about it. Financing the whole thing!”.

No they are not. You seem also out of control, buddy.

It’s all a mix of the second ammendment, their interpretation & execution of that law, a dominant military and guns lobby system (Billionaire$); people loving their guns, no access to good (mental) health care, which allthogether is holding their country hostage, imho.

So yeah, its all out of control. And nothing has changed, except that it’s getting worse.

add.(mental) healthcare

“Fifteen people were killed and 94 injured across 13 states as well as Washington DC”.

These massshootings are so out of control…

Your guess is as good as mine. But if you have watched Russ TV, they aren’t afraid of saying the most ridiculous things.

Though according to the article: Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the head of Rosenergoatom, which operates Russia’s nuclear network, said Ukraine planned to drop ammunition laced with nuclear waste transported from another of the country’s five nuclear stations on the plant.

“Under cover of darkness overnight on 5 July the Ukrainian military will try to attack the Zaporizhzhia station using long-range precision equipment and kamikaze attack drones,” Russian news agencies quoted Karchaa as telling Russian television. He offered no evidence in support of the allegation."

"If detonated, they would not damage the reactors but would create an image of shelling from the Ukrainian side,” the statement on Telegram said. It said the Ukrainian army stood “ready to act under any circumstances”.

In his nightly video message, Zelenskiy said Russia was planning to “simulate an attack” on the plant. “But in any case, the world sees – and cannot fail to see – that the only source of danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is Russia. And no one else.”

Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian military provided no evidence for their assertions"